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James Carroll

Like all Catholics, I gratefully depend on the faithful ministry of the many good priests who serve the church. Yet I offer a broad critique of something central to their lives and identities -- the rule of celibacy. Many priests will recognize the truth of what I describe. I write from inside the question, having lived as a celibate seminarian and priest for more than a decade when I was young. In the Bing Crosby glory days, celibacy was essential to the mystique that set priests apart from other clergy, the Roman collar an “Open sesame!” to respect and status. From a secular perspective, the celibate man or, in the case of nuns, woman made an impression simply by sexual unavailability. But from a religious perspective, the impact came from celibacy’s character as an all-or-nothing bet on the existence of God. The Catholic clergy lived in absolutism, which carried a magnetic pull.

Like all Catholics, I gratefully depend on the faithful ministry of the many good priests who serve the church. Yet I offer a broad critique of something central to their lives and identities -- the rule of celibacy. Many priests will recognize the truth of what I describe.

I write from inside the question, having lived as a celibate seminarian and priest for more than a decade when I was young. In the Bing Crosby glory days, celibacy was essential to the mystique that set priests apart from other clergy, the Roman collar an “Open sesame!” to respect and status.

From a secular perspective, the celibate man or, in the case of nuns, woman made an impression simply by sexual unavailability. But from a religious perspective, the impact came from celibacy’s character as an all-or-nothing bet on the existence of God. The Catholic clergy lived in absolutism, which carried a magnetic pull.

CROSSBEARER: A MEMOIR OF FAITHBy Joe Eszterhas Published by St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

Awareness of death is what enabled Homo erectus to become Homo sapiens. Or so anthropologists speculate. When individual humans began to imagine their own physical demise, probably in reaction to the newly lifeless remains of dear companions, they experienced the future as palpably present. They experienced those already dead as somehow still with them. The ancestor took on a numinous character, which was an opening to the holy. Ancestors became gods, and gods became God. It is not too much to suggest that by reckoning with the harsh fact of death, the self-aware and contemplative creature, in the far mists of time, had its first intimations of the divine.